1. The study of Bowers et al. (1990):Bowers et al. (1990): What is intuition? Oxford English Dictionary: „The immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process“ Intuitive Judgments © POSbase 2003Contributor

2. Intuitive Judgments This immediate apprehension comes from an unconscious organization of contents that results in conscious understanding. People experience this understanding often as a sudden insight (see Metcalfe & Wiebe, 1987). In contrast to everyday use, scientific psychology does not assume that intuitively made decisions must be accurate. © POSbase 2003Contributor

3. Bowers et al. (1990) showed participants pairs of pictures. Both contained the same fragments, but the fragments of one picture depicted a real object whereas the fragments of the other picture did not. Intuitive Judgments © POSbase 2003

4. I show you now three pairs of pictures for ten seconds each. Your task is to find out what object one of the picture shows. If you do not find out which object is shown, please guess which of the two pictures depicts a real object. After each picture, I count how many chose each picture, and I show you the solution. Intuitive Judgments © POSbase 2003

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8. Participants recognized the accurate object in about one third of the pictures. These picture pairs were excluded from further analysis. From the remaining unrecognized picture pairs, participants guesses about which picture is a real object were about 60% right. Intuitive Judgments © POSbase 2003

9. Intuitive Judgments The authors concluded that people had intuitive knowledge to solve this task. This knowledge was available at an early stage of the judgmental process, before they were able to recognize the pictures. Other instances of non-analytic bases of judgments can be found in research on unconscious perception (e.g., Marcel, 1983) and decision making (e.g., Wilson & Schooler, 1991). © POSbase 2003